Analysis
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has told some domestic companies it intends to approve their purchases of Nvidia's new RTX Pro 5500 chip, according to Bloomberg, citing The Information. ByteDance and Alibaba are among the firms the ministry asked to report their purchase plans, and ByteDance alone is weighing an order of up to 1 million units, according to TheNextWeb -- enough to absorb roughly two quarters of Nvidia's entire planned China supply.
A Narrow Opening, Not A Reversal
The RTX Pro 5500 is a workstation graphics card Nvidia unveiled this month, built on its Blackwell architecture with 84GB of memory. Its appeal to Beijing regulators appears to be technical: industry executives expect the chip to fall outside current U.S. export restrictions, giving China's government room to approve it without contradicting Washington's rules or its own domestic-chip push. That's a narrower opening than a blanket policy change -- MIIT's reported approval covers this one chip, not Nvidia's China business broadly.
“## A Narrow Opening, Not A Reversal The RTX Pro 5500 is a workstation graphics card Nvidia unveiled this month, built on its Blackwell architecture with 84GB of memory.”
Beijing Has Been The Bigger Obstacle Lately
For most of 2026, China's own regulators, not U.S. export controls, have been the tighter constraint on Nvidia's China sales. The Cyberspace Administration of China barred ByteDance, Alibaba and other firms from buying Nvidia's RTX Pro 6000D server chips earlier this year, part of a deliberate push toward domestic silicon. It's working: Bernstein estimates Nvidia's share of China's AI-chip market will fall to roughly 8% this year from about 40% in 2025, while Huawei's Ascend line climbs toward 50%. China's National Development and Reform Commission is separately drafting a roughly 2 trillion yuan plan to link the country's data centers into one AI computing grid by 2028, with a reported mandate that 80% of the underlying chips be domestically sourced.
The Numbers Nvidia Needs
Set against that backdrop, a green light on even one chip model matters to a China revenue line that's been effectively stalled since the RTX Pro 6000D ban. ByteDance's reported million-unit interest would be a meaningful chunk of Nvidia's constrained China allocation, tracked alongside the rest of the AI infrastructure buildout on our funding tracker -- but it's still a fraction of what Nvidia sold into China before Beijing's domestic-chip campaign accelerated. Whether MIIT's signal extends to Nvidia's higher-end AI training silicon, where Huawei's Ascend chips are the direct substitute, is the open question that determines whether this is a rounding error or the start of a real thaw.
What Could Still Go Wrong
Nothing here is finalized. The Information's report is sourced to people familiar with the matter, Reuters said it could not independently verify it, and MIIT hasn't made a public announcement. Beijing has reversed course on Nvidia purchases before, and a formal approval for one workstation chip doesn't commit China to easing restrictions on the training-class GPUs that actually matter for frontier buildouts at companies like Nscale. Whether this narrow opening survives contact with Beijing's own domestic-chip mandate remains to be seen.
For US chip and AI-infrastructure investors, the number to track next quarter isn't the headline chip -- it's whether Nvidia's disclosed China revenue moves at all, or whether Huawei's share gains keep compounding regardless of what MIIT approves on paper.